In 1977, Davis received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1979 she won a Best Actress Emmy. She wrote a biography, The Lonely Life, in the 1960s, and Mother Goddam in 1975. In 1985, her daughter, B.D. Hyman[?], wrote a tell-all book, My Mother's Keeper, in which she savaged her mother. Davis wrote another book, This N That, in the late 1980s, and Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, which appeared the year after her death, updating what had happened since her first biography had been published.

On July 19, 2001, Steven Spielberg purchased Davis' Oscar statuette for Jezebel at a Christie's auction and returned it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This was to protect an Oscar from commercial exploitation.

Bette Davis died in 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France following a long battle with breast cancer, and after having suffered at least one serious stroke. On Davis's tombstone is written, "She did it the hard way."